I leave for Colombia tomorrow, and I’ve been trying to learn as much about the country as I can, while thinking about how to approach making photographs in my short 11 days there. For the last month I’ve been listening to Gabriel Garcia Marquez novels on my bike rides to work. I’ve finished Love in the Time of Cholera and I’m half way through One Hundred Years of Solitude (which I’ve read before, but remember little from, apart from the line: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”)  

I’ll admit that every time I’ve had to avoid a cab or a brazen left-hand turn, or lament the lack of bike lane, I lose my train of thought, but Marquez’s descriptions have coloured my mornings and given me a magical veil through which to view the mundane commute. Magical realism - Garcia Marquez signature - is often defined as fiction that integrates elements of fantasy into otherwise realistic settings. In this way, Garcia Marquez makes the surreal more genuine than the harshest of realities. My morning literary escapes have inspired me to think about the fine-line between reality and fantasy, and how towing that line is perhaps, the big magic. 

In an interview with the New York Times, Garcia Marquez said that the “tricks you need to transform something which appears fantastic, unbelievable into something plausible, credible, those I learned from journalism. … The key is to tell it straight…” And that got me thinking about what it means to make a good photograph. What Garcia Marquez has done with his writing is really the opposite of what he’s quoted above…he’s turned the plausible into the unbelievable, but he has a knack of making the surreal more casual than fantastic. Although his descriptions are painstakingly precise, they are not definitive, because his writing leaves behind a trail of questions. 

I head to Colombia tomorrow with some added uncertainty. This morning I read that the revolutionary forces have called up arms again, after only a few years of armistice. The Colombian president, Ivan Duque, has in turn called for capture of the revolutionary leaders. Reading that ‘straight’, credible journalism was much more taxing than walking the fine-line of the real, laced with magic.